


Patron of Urchins

by Tonko



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Child Death, Child Neglect, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-25 17:06:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18578833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tonko/pseuds/Tonko
Summary: Having sufficient heart to care may be more trouble than it's worth. And yet.





	Patron of Urchins

**Author's Note:**

> If anything contradicts Fallen London canon, admittedly I didn't get as deep as I wanted into it, but the atmosphere sticks with you...
> 
> Warning: Contains descriptions of children surviving, or not, as well as you can expect in a place like this. Please avoid if this is a sensitive subject.

It probably began, Aloysius thought, when he'd stalked that fleeing urchin across the rooftops, and actually caught her.

And then, actually let her go. 

He'd extracted the lost correspondence from her grubby hand, then released her other wrist, by which he'd been half-dangling her. She'd scuttled back and then stared, glinting eyes darting between her wrist, and him. 

“Get on, now,” he'd waved her away, and then she'd vanished into the dark, leaving him to return the purloined letters to their owner.

That likely would have meant nothing on its own. 

Then he came upon one of the Knotted Sock children arms-deep in a crate in one of the rooms of the building he'd been... ahem. Investigating. The child froze, as if stillness could hide its small, ragged form in the shaft of gaslight through the broken wall. 

Aloysius paused at the sight, met huge, round eyes for a moment, saw the too-thin limbs tighten, ready to flinch and flee. He moved on to the next room.

Keeping an ear cocked towards where he'd seen the child, he eventually heard faint scuffles, then a tumble and clomping escape. Hm. Stealth wasn't that one's strong suit, hopefully the spoils would help it survive the night.

Some weeks later Aloysius paused in the Square, to dare a few moments of listening to the Thing in The Well, and discovered a whimpering urchin clinging by a caught sleeve and broken fingernails to the inner lip of the slime-coated stonework. Fallen in? Tossed there as a joke by one of the older, or rival gangs? Pickpocketed the wrong mark and promptly punished? Any one of those was as likely as anything else. He reached in, stolidly ignoring the glint of... was it eyes? Teeth?—far below past the dangling child, and pulled her out. 

She collapsed on the cobblestones at his feet, and the keening, gibbering disappointment of the Thing was easy enough to disregard, for the moment. The child's sobbing gasps were louder. “Here,” he said, and crouched before her. He reached for his hip flask. Cheap brandy today, nothing else at hand. All the better to use like this than any Greyfields vintage, he supposed. She had no strength to pull against his grip when he grasped her skinny forearm to draw her hand towards him and dribble the alcohol over the bloody fingertips. Her gasps turned to whimpers and she squirmed, but didn't resist when he did the same to her other hand. 

He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed at her fingers, wiping away grime, blood, and alcohol, then sloshed a little more of the cheap vintage over both her hands. He pushed the handkerchief into her sleeve, he certainly had no more use for it, and released her. She stuck two fingers of one hand gingerly into her mouth, and scooted back, then rose on wobbling feet, awkwardly without using her hands, and fled. The faded checkered cloth knotted around her waist meant she was probably one of the Stackwood gang.

The urchin gangs fought viciously over their territories among themselves, a juvenile underlayer to the matured ones that guarded a differently-bordered map of the Neath. But they tended to unite against threats that cut across their ranges, and had their own strange honour code. And their own trade in information.

So when the Fisher-Kings poked their heads from their rooftop niches and asked him to be their distraction as they dropped fishing hooks into pockets and purses, Aloysius wondered if it was some manner of test, now, that these children were putting to him. The potential amusement of the exercise caused him to agree, for lack of any pressing matters at the time. 

He seemed to serve his purpose to their satisfaction. The one in charge of this knot of begrimed juvenile larceny dropped a sack of Rostygold into his bemused hands when they were done for the afternoon. The profit of the venture drew him back, now and again, to help their hooks catch on items of potential value, and he began to get furtive greetings from time to time, gap-toothed grins and spore-toffee candies dropped into his pockets.

One day, things took a turn, as had to happen eventually. 

The local neddy-men swung through the crowd, their intermittent constable-granted authority in full force this day, along with their clubs. The more-or-less respectable folk parting before them didn't warrant their attention, but blatant lawbreaking might draw it. Aloysius turned away from his next intended mark with casual nonchalance. The dangling hooks withdrew up over the eaves. 

Still. When one of the neddy-men's gazes rose above the level of the gutters, and sharpened, Aloysius heard a yelp of warning from the urchins' leader. One of the neddy-men raised his flintlock and fired, laughing. The urchins scattered and a brief rain of wet moss, broken mushrooms and rotted shingling descended as the children fled. 

The neddy-men were too far, just then, to hear the slick slide on the shingles and sickening thud in the alley that Aloysius' ears picked up easily. The other passers-by who recognized those sounds ignored it, more or less. Aloysius caught more than one wince and a couple of sympathetic abortive glances. No one, of course, actually moved towards the alley to investigate. He was the only one to meander against the general flow of foot-traffic, however, placing himself in front of the alley mouth and unfolding a letter found in a passing pocket to peruse with falsely pensive eyes as the neddy-men drew near. 

The curses tossed roofwards ceased, though, as one of them spotted a group of Rubbery Man farther down the street. Safety in numbers, Aloysius thought in slightly guilty relief, the Rubbery Men would weather this harassment well enough, not being caught alone. Unless they resisted, of course.

When the neddy-men were gone far enough along, their attention fully engaged by this opportunity to abuse the unfortunate tentacled men, Aloysius abandoned his air of concern over what had turned out to be a ciphered ledger page. Tucking it away—he would deliver this borrowed camouflage later, after cracking it—he turned into the alley.

The crumpled pile of rags exposed too much grimy skin, pale limbs uncovered and sprawled, for the fallen child go unnoticed for long. The jeering and dull thuds down the street were an unknowing substitution for a mercy that might be pointless—but no, the crumpled shape breathed. Well then. 

Aloysius crouched by the child. Arm bent very wrong. Blood slicked over a dirty face from a head wound. Eyes half-closed, but they blinked slowly as he loomed, then fearful tension eased and they closed. What was that—trust? Not that the child had a choice. Well, if it was to die from its fall, perhaps there were worse final sights than seeing someone it knew didn't prey on urchins.

A glance upward revealed no curious or worried faces staring down from the roofs. Oh—a pale flash there, down at the alley's cul-de-sac other end, gone in an instant.

“Leaving you to my care, it would appear,” Aloysius muttered dubiously. Arranging the child deeper in the shadows to heal or die, hidden from hostile eyes, was probably the most they expected, and proving their expectation, it was also his first thought.

But no. Not that. The shadows looked particularly hungry, and this child was broken. Suppose the child awoke, immobilized by pain to be chewed by rats until the end, eyes harvested by spiders... That wasn't something Aloysius would allow. Sliding his coat off, he laid it out and collected the urchin in it, using the rags it wore to bind the broken arm across its own chest. A swipe of his presciently red handkerchief across the child's face removed much of the blood. In a moment of inspiration, he tied it like a headscarf around the thin face. The child was small and slight enough that even the scraped and scratched too-skinny legs were hidden under the tails of the coat. Hefting the light load like a parent transporting sleeping offspring, he watched the directions of gazes, then slid smoothly from the alley into the street's traffic.

*

The bookshop owner was conveniently occupied by a patron. The sound of a reedy scholar discussing the merits of binding glue promised that the owner would not chase after another talking companion this evening. Aloysius slipped in through the rear door and climbed the dark, narrow stairs to his rear-alley locked entrance. Locating the key was a minor juggling act, achieved without either dropping the key through the planks of the stairs, or jostling the unconscious urchin.

The smell of cloves curled into the stairwell before he closed the door behind him, the scented candlesmoke still lingering in the air from when that young woman had visited last night. His bedroom was probably still redolent of it, but the area he'd made into his sitting room bore just the fainter scent. Moving to his small hearth, he lay the urchin on the rug there, and went to light the lamps and collect supplies. 

A wet cloth over the half-scabbed mess in the child's matted hair cleared much of the debris, and he cut away the rest. A judicious dusting of clotting spores in the wound held further blood inside where it belonged. Unwrapping the rest of the little body, Aloysius peeled away layers of rags, throwing the first few into the fire before he thought better of it, and then merely threw the rest into the laundry-pot instead. Under the rags, the child proved to be male.

Aloysius worked with what speed he was able to, discovering the twisted arm was a dislocation of the elbow, and not a break. A slow pull and one sickening sound had it back in place. Prodding at the skinny torso revealed no hard places that might mean something within had burst. Old bruises were revealed in patchwork as he pushed a wet cloth over the grimy skin, but nowhere did he find any trace of a projectile wound. He had not been shot, had only slipped.

He pulled engorged ticks from a few spots and offered them to Maurice when the bat flapped down from the rafters to investigate, but found neither lice nor fleas. Perhaps the Fisher-Kings had a bathing hole. 

A mat of folded blankets before the hearth substituted as a bed. He arranged the boy before the fire, under another blanket for extra measure, and went to draw water to boil the rags clean. Presently there was nothing to do but wait. Not nearly stupid enough to leave a prepubescent thief, even so damaged, alone in his home, he retrieved a stack of unsorted code-correspondence and watched over his unexpected charge.

The boy recovered, as Aloysius had expected when he'd survived the initial night. He slept most of the following day away, taking food and broth when he half-woke, and opened his eyes to lie still and staring when Aloysius changed the dressing on his head. 

In the evening he awoke fully, barely mobile but, with the return of his awareness had come jittery tension and flinching wariness of this place and of Aloysius' stare. He pulled on his rags in stiff, painful silence, grunting in response to Aloysius' even-voiced queries, worded to probe for any serious remaining symptoms. 

He limped down the stairs with Aloysius trailing behind to open the door and let him out, and then he fled into the grey of morning. His faded, but clean, rags melted quickly into the damp fog. A noise overhead made Aloysius look upward, but there was nothing to see. With a shrug, he returned to his room. A draft struck the bare skin of his arms, and he looked towards the window. It was open partway where it hadn't been before, and a papery lump sat on the sill. 

Gingerly parting the crumpled and smeared newsprint, Aloysius revealed a handful of squashed spore-toffee candies.

He didn't realize what it all meant, at first. The non-hostile cooperation, punctuated with occasional actual magnanimity, that he enjoyed with the urchin gangs had altered to something new on their side. Small things, like the squashed-together spore-toffee, piled upon themselves.

Passing by an alley, a scuffling sound next to him: “Not 'im, not _'im_ , you stupid!” and the thump of a small fist on another small body as he passed an alley. A glance behind showed him one urchin yanking another back into the shadows by the hair.

The blatant lifting of his hat from his head, neatly plucked from above. Then when he peered upward, the grinning face and grubby hand—not fishing hook, lowering the hat back to him. A few more faces—Fisher Kings all, popped up, making various faces with a kind of transparent amusement that made him snort in mirth himself, and he took his hat back, tipping it at them graciously before replacing it.

The truly surprising happened when he sent a lover on his way in the morning, out the front door this time--it was by far the more scenic, and he suspected the young devil would enjoy the book shop; he had a taste for mycological journals. When Aloysius returned to his room, he passed through to his sitting room to find two wary urchins crouched against the wall below his now-open window, with a bleeding third one between them.

The blood was mostly dried brown and all three were near blue with night chill. “We waited fer ye t'finish” said the oldest one, a girl... maybe, Aloysius thought. The three shivered and waited for him to react.

“Hm,” Aloysius said, and placed a few fungus-logs on the hearth to bring the fire up a little higher. 

He had no desire for his affairs to be disturbed, nor to be inconvenienced unless it was at his own choosing.

But it was clear it still remained his choice. And they hadn't inconvenienced him, after all. Waiting all night for him to be alone. And it was very cold at this time of year. There, that would do for the fire. 

“Come here,” he said. The two uninjured ones exchanged glances, brittle and dubious. The maybe-a-girl shifted nervously. Neither let go of their charge. “Never mind,” he dismissed his own words. “Just another moment, wait,” he told them, and made up that makeshift blanket-bed once again.

He stepped back a few paces, then another two, and sat at his own table, on the other side from the painfully wary children. That did it. They gingerly crossed to the hearth, depositing their comrade their and drawing back, the older one with relief, the younger one with reluctance as obvious as its fear of him. 

“'E got hit on 'is face,” the older one said. “Eye's busted up. Blood an... an fings.”

“Go on,” he told them, and stood, moving towards the laid-out urchin. They lurched back at his approach, and so he didn't look at them, only marked their escape through the window by sound.

Another mess of blood and rags. Another slow cleaning, boiling of the rags, binding of wounds. This time, it did not end so well. 

The child did wake, once, cried a few times, until Aloysius was at his side, and then he burrowed against the pillow as Aloysius adjusted the blanket, for all the 'Neath like a child with a home. Perhaps he'd had one, before his stint among the Fisher Kings.

He fell asleep again, too deep, past waking.

Aloysius returned to him just before the end, meaning to change the bandages, and the erratic, hitching breathing was all too obvious. Each one slower than the last, with a longer pause before the next... and the next... 

“Oh, must you?” Aloysius asked him quietly, settling one hand lightly on the narrow chest, combed lightly through the ragged hair.

And then there was no more. A brief shiver ran through the small shape, a last little exhale, and then nothing. 

Small bodies cooled so fast, he realized. Even in front of his warm fire. 

The souls of urchins were agile, he told himself. They nearly always escaped the spirifers, and this one's certainly would. And the tomb-colonies would not add children to their populations. 

“There, there,” Aloysius said, stroking the boy's hair, soothing who, he wasn't sure, and his eyes watered unbecomingly. “There, there.”

His window creaked, which never happened unless an urchin sought his attention.

“'E's dead,” the maybe-a-girl's voice was thick.

“Yes,” Aloysius confirmed. Should he simply step back now? But small feet padded towards him, the steps, like the window, made to be heard.

The urchin came to stand at his shoulder, staring down at the boy's body, and then squatted down, reaching out—pausing until he withdrew his own hand—to touch the boy's hair as well. 

“'Is name were Dunny. Dummy Dunny, fooled all them toffs wif 'is ickle lost boy face.”

“I'm sorry,” Aloysius said, to his own surprise. To grieve was weak. To show weakness... 

“S'warm 'ere,” came the reply. “S'nice. You 'elped.”


End file.
